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Xen and The Art of Virtualization

Xen and the Art of Virtualization describes the design and evaluation of the Xen virtual machine monitor. Xen uses paravirtualization, which requires modifying guest operating systems, to provide high performance virtualization with minimal overhead. It introduces a virtual machine interface for memory, CPU, and I/O that abstracts the underlying hardware. Evaluation shows Xen provides better performance than VMware and supports full operating systems and many concurrent virtual machines with good performance isolation.

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30 views

Xen and The Art of Virtualization

Xen and the Art of Virtualization describes the design and evaluation of the Xen virtual machine monitor. Xen uses paravirtualization, which requires modifying guest operating systems, to provide high performance virtualization with minimal overhead. It introduces a virtual machine interface for memory, CPU, and I/O that abstracts the underlying hardware. Evaluation shows Xen provides better performance than VMware and supports full operating systems and many concurrent virtual machines with good performance isolation.

Uploaded by

Argun Gogus
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PPT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Xen and the Art of

Virtualization
Paul Barham, Boris Dragovic, Keir Fraser, Steven Hand, Tim
Harris, Alex Ho, Rolf Neugebauer, Ian Pratt, Andrew Warfield

By Tyrel Russell
October 25, 2006
Overview
 A virtual machine monitor
 Paravirtualization
 Design
 Evaluation
 Discussion
Motivating Goals
 Virtual machine monitor
– allows isolation of processes and virtual
machines
– supports a variety of guest operating systems
– performance overhead is minimal
Paravirtualization
 Provides an abstract machine similar to the
underlying machine
 Avoids difficulties of virtualizing all parts of
the architecture
 Specifically, avoids parts of the x86
architecture that weren’t designed for
virtualization
 Requires modification of guest OSes
Xen Design Principles
 Support unmodified application binaries
 Support full multi-application operating
systems
 Paravirtualization is necessary for
performance
 Hiding the effects of resource virtualization
The Virtual Machine Interface
 Memory Management
– Guest OSes manage and allocate hardware
page tables
– Avoids TLB flushes by maintaining Xen in every
address spaces
 CPU
– Guest OSes must run at a lower privilege level
 Device I/O
– Uses a shared buffer to increase performance
Cost of Porting OS to Xen
 Modify code accessing page tables
 Virtual network driver
 Virtual block driver
 Rewriting routines using privileged
instructions
 Changing low-level system initialization
code
 Changing boot-loading mechanism
The Control Interface
 Hypervisor controls
basic operations
 Control of the system
is performed by the
Control Plane Software
 Separate Guest OS
called the Domain0
Hypercalls and Events
 Hypercalls perform a synchronous software
trap
– Needed to perform privileged operations
– Updating page tables
 Communication from a guest OS and Xen is
performed by an event system
– Including device interrupts and termination
requests
I/O Rings
 A ring of I/O
descriptors
 Buffer memory is
provided by the guest
OS
 Requests and
responses can be
batched
Subsystem Virtualization
 CPU Scheduling
 Time and timers
 Virtual Address Translation
 Physical Memory
 Network
 Disk
CPU Scheduling and Timers
 Uses the Borrowed Virtual Time scheduling
algorithm
– Work conserving
– Low-latency wakeup
 Guest OSes can see both real and virtual
time
– Xen provides a timer through the event
mechanism to deal with guest OS timers
Virtual Address Translation
 Page Tables cannot be directly written
– Writes must be validated
 Page tables are associated with:
– a type
– a reference count
 To minimize calls, the requests can be
batched
Physical Memory
 Memory is reserved for a guest OS statically
 Xen can pass more pages if necessary
through a balloon driver
 Guest OSes create an illusion of contiguous
physical memory using a shared translation
array
Network
 Virtual Firewall Router
– One or more network interfaces
 Network interface is two I/O rings of
descriptors
– Transmission
– Receive
 The descriptors have a set of rules to
perform operations like firewall functions
Disk
 Domain0 has unchecked access
 Others access through virtual block drivers
 A VBD is a list ownership and access
control information
 Accessed using the I/O ring mechanism
 A translation table is maintained by
Domain0 in the hypervisor
Building a New Domain
 Domain0 creates new domains
 Allocates a new address space
 Informs Xen of initial register state
 Builds boot-time address space to match
guest OS
Evaluation
 Compared:
– Linux
– XenoLinux (Xen)
– VMware workstation 3.2
– User-Mode Linux
Tests
 Relative Performance Tests
 Operating System Benchmarks
 Concurrent Virtual Machines
 Performance Isolation
 Scalability
Discussion
 Is the memory load of guest operating systems acceptable
to reach their scalability goal? Especially with Windows?
 How much modification of guest operating systems is too
much? That is, is several thousand lines of code per
operating system actually minimal effort?
 What information is transparent to a guest OS in Xen? In
other words, how much information can be obtained
through Xen about other guests?
 They assume top 64MB of address will not be used by
applications. Is this reasonable?
 Trade-off between paravirtualization and full virtualization

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